Congress enters final lap of August ‘recess,’ Aug. 30, 2017

On this day, Congress enters its final week of a pre-programmed August recess which went into effect in 1970. That year, passage of the Legislative Reorganization Act purportedly put an end to uninterrupted yearlong sessions and directed that a monthlong summer break be incorporated into the lawmakers’ annual calendar.

(In 1959, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith had diagnosed “confused thinking, harmful emotions, destructive tempers, unsound and unwise legislation, and ill health” that resulted, the Maine Republican said, from failing to take a long summer break from the legislative merry-go-round.)

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But this year, Senate leaders carved out a loophole. With the tacit approval of the Democratic minority, the Senate, rather than pass an adjournment resolution, has continued to meet in pro forma sessions. Under its rules, that required a volunteer senator to appear in the chamber every three days to lead a minutelong gavel-in, gavel-out session.

That maneuver effectively blocked President Donald Trump from being able to fill any vacant executive branch slots without his appointee being nominated and subjected to senatorial confirmation. It had its genesis in bipartisan fears that Trump would fire (or perhaps move) Jeff Sessions from the Justice Department and replace him with an attorney general who would stay in place at least through 2018 without Senate approval and who would reward Trump by pliantly squashing the current investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

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Consequently, the Senate has met in pro forma sessions on Aug. 4, 8, 11, 15, 18, 22, 25, 29, and will do so again on Friday, Sept. 1. No votes, however, will occur until at least Sept. 5.

President Barack Obama challenged the recess loophole in 2014 when he made a series of appointments even though the Senate was meeting in a pro forma session every three days. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently unanimously ruled that under the Constitution the Senate needed to be away for at least 10 full days for a president to act on his own.

Before the Senate proved unable to pass a health care bill, 10 Republican senators wrote Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) asking him to cancel the August recess. They argued that the Senate should spend the month focused on fixing health care, funding the government, dealing with the debt ceiling, passing a budget resolution and revamping the tax code.

The senators were David Perdue of Georgia, Steve Daines of Montana, Joni Ernst of Iowa, John Kennedy of Louisiana, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Mike Lee of Utah, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Luther Strange of Alabama, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. McConnell demurred. Beginning in late July, after the health care bill failed to muster the needed 51 votes, senators scattered far and wide.

Whatever transpires next on Capitol Hill, the nation will never return to the pre-Civil War agrarian society — when members convened their sessions in December and adjourned in the spring, before the summer heat and humidity in a muggy Washington, D.C., could overwhelm them.